WHILE water flowing down the Avoca River from Charlton is currently threatening homes and farmland at Quambatook, local farmer and Grain Growers chair Brett Hosking is confident banks will continue to hold the water back.
But what is playing on his mind, and the minds of other local farmers, is predictions of up to another 80mm of rainfall later in the week.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, falls may not quite reach those levels but will still be significant, with 8-15mm forecast for Thursday, 4-8mm for Friday, 10-20mm for Sunday and 6-20mm for Monday.
“The part that has every person in the area absolutely petrified is every time they click on the internet and look at another weather forecast,” Mr Hosking told the Gannawarra Times.
“At this stage, while there are a lot of models of green indicating that it will be a sizable rainfall event later this week, it is still just a forecast – it could be less, it could be more, it could be exactly right.
“But it will be a wait-and-see and kind of deal with the consequences of that.”
While crops around Quambatook have so far not been inundated with flooding from the river, the heavy rainfall already had left an impact, particularly on lentil and barley crops.
“Lentils in particular just don’t really like water around their roots and even from just from the heavy rainfall events of the past fortnight or so they have had that,” Mr Hosking said.
“We are seeing some patches in lentils that are going out from water stress.
“Barley can be a little bit the same, so where barley is sitting in water, the roots get starved of oxygen and we are starting to see some of those patches go out as well.
“But so far most crops have been fairly resilient, and a lot of the water has run on and run off the crop or run through the crop, so it is kind of like a fresh irrigation flush, which isn’t doing the crop a great deal of good at the moment when the ground is wet from the rain, but it is not harming the crop necessarily either.”
Mr Hosking believed it was likely some crops will be flattened come harvest time, making them difficult to get off the paddocks.
“But if they are the worst consequences we have as a result of all of this weather, then we have done alright,” he said.
Calling himself an optimist, Mr Hosking was hopeful the loss of crops won’t be overly significant.
“The estimate for Australia’s crop size this year is hopefully in excess of 60 million tonnes,” he said.
“We reckon the area where the rain’s fallen there will probably be about 20 million of those tonnes grown in those areas.
“If we could get away with less than five per cent of that being damaged or lost, I think that would be a hopeful outcome.”
In talking to other farmers from the Loddon, Buloke and Gannwarra shires, Mr Hosking said one of the major points of concern is the damage to infrastructure and roads.
“We’ve seen roads wiped out around places like Bridgewater and Serpentine, and we know that they are our critical freight routes to port for our grain,” he said.
“Our local governments are already stretched out – we can’t be expecting them to foot the massive bill for road repairs.
“We need to be very fast with responding to those infrastructure challenges.”
